"Then you had better go to bed," said Mrs. Edes, and the two little girls stood carefully aside to allow her to pass. "Good night, children," said Mrs. Edes without turning her mink-crowned head. The little girls watched the last yellow swirl of their mother's skirts, disappearing around the stair-landing, then Adelaide spoke. "I mean to wear red, myself, when I'm grown up," said she. "Ho, just because Jim Carr likes red," retorted Maida. "As for me, I mean to have a gown just like hers, only a little deeper shade of yellow." Adelaide laughed, an unpleasantly snarling little laugh. "Ho," said she, "just because Val Thomas likes yellow." Then the coloured maid, Emma, who was cross because Mrs. Edes' evening out had deprived her of her own, and had been ruthlessly hanging her mistress's gown which she had worn to the club in a wad on a closet hook, disregarding its perfumed hanger, turned upon them. "Heah, ye chillun," said she, "your ma sid for you to go to baid." Each little girl had her white bed with a canopy of pink silk in a charming room. There were garlands of rosebuds on the wallpaper and the furniture was covered with rosebud chintz. While their mother was indignantly sailing across the North River, her daughters lay awake, building air-castles about themselves and their boy-lovers, which fevered their imaginations, and aged them horribly in a spiritual sense. "Amy White's mother plays dominoes with her every evening," Maida remarked. Her voice sounded incredibly old, full of faint derisiveness and satire, but absolutely non-complaining. "Amy White's mother would look awfully funny in a gown like Mamma's," said Adelaide. "I suppose that is why she plays dominoes with Amy," said Maida in her old voice. "Oh, don't talk any more, Maida, I want to go to sleep," said Adelaide pettishly, but she was not in the least sleepy. She wished to return to the air-castle in which she had been having sweet converse with Jim Carr. This air-castle was the abode of innocence, but it was not yet time for its building at all. It was such a little childish creature who lay curled up under the coverlid strewn with rosebuds that the gates of any air-castle of life and love, and knowledge, however innocent and ignorant, should have been barred against her, perhaps with dominoes.